The Bible shows that our natural heart and mind are not in harmony with God and His way. Satan, the devil, has deceived us and made us enemies of God by influencing us to sin and rebel against God. People can attribute disaster directly to sins, but Jesus, in our Gospel reading for the third Sunday in Lent, tells us that God does not directly use tragedy to judge us for our sins. Jesus asked: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you.” “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them–do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you.” “But unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (Lk 13:1-5). Jesus is not offering a cause-and-effect Gospel. He is offering a choice Gospel between life and death, and the choice Gospel that begins with repentance is always before us; hence, God’s judgment will come on each of us if we do not choose to repent. Because humanity is in sin and a slave to evil desires, life’s fragility gives it urgency.

Being alive as the year of grace, the parable’s gardener requests an extra year for the fig tree, which offers the urgent opportunity for repentance because God is not interested in the death of a sinner but in rejoicing in his or her salvation. Many churches and individuals occupy space others would have used for fruitful ministry and leadership. The double tragedy in the church and its leadership today is not to blossom and be fruitful while occupying spaces of mission and leadership. The abuse of the mission space and leadership opportunity calls for repentance as the urgent demand of the present.

John Wesley’s description of repentance as the “porch” of religion reminds us that the only requirement to be part of Methodist society was a desire to flee the wrath to come. Repentance from dead works and faith as the only gate and way to God’s kingdom are necessary at the beginning of the Christian journey. We should not mistake our good fortune as evidence of God’s special blessing. Jesus’ words about judgment and repentance are scary, yet they depict human life as a gift, albeit a fragile one. Khaled Anatolios, in the keynote address at the Wesleyan Theological Society Annual meeting, said, “If you bypass repentance, you bypass Jesus Christ.”

Repentance begins with a heart filled with remorse and contrition, a changing of minds, admitting our sins, and confessing our failure to God (Acts 2:37). To use the language of Jesus’ parable of the fig tree, repentance is about bearing fruit, visible results in our lives.

When we repent of our sins, as believers, Jesus’ divine power gives us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him that has called us to glory and virtue. Believers are given ‘exceeding great and precious promises: that by these acts of repentance, we might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world through lust. The reflection is that lust is the foundation of corruption in the church and the world. Repentance enhances spiritual diligence, faith virtue, and virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. Repentance is the source and application of scriptural holiness. Repentance enhances the privilege and transforming power of knowing God. Repentance is the soil for nurturing a responsible and progressive character of Christian growth (2 Pet 1: 1-21). No human wisdom or ideology is needed to supplement repentance. The church message today lacks power because there is no repentance.

Repentance is the urgent demand of the present to raise more partakers of the Divine nature. Our participation in God’s nature is another description of repentance that produces the new birth, that being spiritually ‘born again’ (Jn 3;3). When we abound in repentance, we shall neither be barren nor unfruitful (like the fig tree) in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Anyone or a church that lacks repentance is blind and cannot see far off.

Any effective mission, leadership, and evangelism strategy or theology must have repentance at its heart; otherwise, it is not a Christian strategy or theology. Repentance, beyond moral uprightness or expression of regret, refers to a changed mind, ‘to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different perspective.’ Repentance, coupled with its moral applications, is given by God as a new consciousness of one’s shortcomings and one’s dire circumstances, like the parable of the prodigal son.

A parable suggests an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. The parable of the fig tree refers primarily to Israel (Joel 1:7, Hos. 9:10). However, its truth applies also to all individuals who claim to believe in Jesus yet fail to turn from their own way and truly follow Him. Jesus’ parable of the fig tree reflects His offer of a chance for repentance and forgiveness of sin, showing His grace toward believers. 

Jesus’ parable of the fig tree reminds us of the need for repentance as a universal condition. When Jesus says, twice, “Unless you repent, you will all perish”, he refers to death in an eschatological sense, a destruction of one’s soul. Jesus’ short parable about a fig tree speaks of imminent judgment and resonates with John the Baptizer using similar images in Luke 3:9: “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Lk 3:9). The time to repent is now. Tomorrow may be too late. As we live, God has given us extra time, like the barren fig tree. Let us prayerfully sing this hymn by Charles Wesley together to heed Jesus’ urgent call of repentance less we die and perish:

1 Sinners, turn: why will ye die?
God, your Maker, asks you Why;
God, who did your being give,
Made you with Himself to live.

2 Sinners, turn: why will ye die?
God, your Savior, asks you why;
Will ye not in Him believe?
He has died that ye might live.

3 Will you let Him die in vain?
Crucify your Lord again?
Why, ye ransomed sinners, why
Will you slight His grace and die?

4 Sinners, turn: why will ye die?
God, the Spirit, asks you why;
Often with you has He strove,
Wooed you to embrace His love.

5 Will ye not His grace receive?
Will ye still refuse to live?
O ye dying sinners, why,
Why will you forever die?